


Hope You Find Your Peace

by triggerswaggiehavoc



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Internal Conflict, M/M, Mental Instability, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Violent Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-23
Updated: 2017-08-23
Packaged: 2018-12-19 02:10:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11887698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triggerswaggiehavoc/pseuds/triggerswaggiehavoc
Summary: Wonwoo dances on a tightrope looking for the silver lining to destruction.





	Hope You Find Your Peace

**Author's Note:**

> heyyyy everybody. before u read i want to let u know that this is a little heavier than most of what i usually write so i wasn't sure how to tag it so if u read it and think of a way i can tag it that will be better for other readers please let me know! also i did a lot of research on intrusive thoughts while i was writing this but i can't really write from experience here so if something strikes u as incorrect/something that needs to be fixed, again please let me know!

It’s therapeutic.

Wonwoo wraps his fingers around the handle, rubber grip smooth against his calloused palms, and heaves his arm in the air, high over his head. Sunlight glints off everything while he stands like that: the white toes of his old shoes, the polished keys of the piano, the gleaming head of the hammer. He takes a slow breath while he stands there, poised and ready, early evening heat drawing beads of sweat at the base of his neck. One breath becomes two, three, four. In and out, slow and slower. Seven long exhales, and he swings, every ounce of force in his arms and all the help of gravity until the fat metal face of the mallet breaks the keys in the center of the spread with a nasty clang. Shards of ivory fly from where the keys now sit dented and mangled, and Wonwoo swings again.

He doesn’t know why he likes it so much, wearing his arms out with a hammer clutched so tight in hand until all that’s left of the piano is broken pieces of wood, the ruined remains of what used to be something beautiful and delicate and special to someone.  Maybe that’s what makes it so relieving, that knowledge that something once so precious and treasured has been reduced no more than a pile of garbage, how he has the power to tear it apart into nothing but several heavy duty Hefty’s worth of rubble just as long as he decides he wants to. Maybe that’s a fucked up way to feel about it, but that doesn’t stop the relief from flooding his chest when he’s finally beaten every last key into nothing but coarse dust. With dirt from the empty field sticking to his soles, he trudges back to the car to get the garbage bags and toss the dusty hammer in the dustier passenger seat.

It probably started when his great aunt died. She had a piano at her house, one she used to play simple little tunes on when Wonwoo was a kid and got carted over there whenever his parents wanted to have a weekend to themselves. Nobody knew what to do with it after she died, this dusty old thing with keys that stuck and never went in tune, so they decided, hey, why not give it to Wonwoo? He apparently said something once that he didn’t remember in the first place about wanting to learn piano, and it was better than having it go to rot in a Goodwill, so his dad and his uncle moved it promptly into his apartment that was far too small to have a piano anywhere inside it and bid the old thing adieu with a heartless pat to its top.

Nothing ever drove him up the wall quite as much as that piano. He stubbed his toes on it every time he tried to walk by, banged his knees into it, tripped and slammed his shoulders into it on the way down. He tried to play it all of one time, whereupon he learned not a single one of the keys would even press down enough to generate a sound but the very lowest C, and even that was horribly out of tune. The very last straw had been a large bruise on the thigh garnered one morning as he rushed out the door in a last-ditch effort to make it to work on time and very gracelessly stumbled into the side with most of his body. He got to work four minutes late that day with one very sore leg and blood pumping with unbridled rage, and he resolved while he eyed up the injury in the bathroom to get rid of the piano that day.

When afternoon came and he found himself free, his first order of business was enlisting the help of his very confused neighbor to shove it out of his apartment and get it loaded into the back of his car over the folded down seats in the back. Once the piano was in there, though, he wasn’t really sure what to do with it. The idea didn’t come to him until he’d spent a good deal of time driving around town without aim, when his eyes came to rest on the sign for a hardware store and his jittery hands whipped him into the parking lot, restless feet carried him inside and straight to the full stock of hammers. Thus was the beginning.

He throws one last bag filled with broken shreds of piano in the back with just enough force to bleed out the excess rage and just enough tenderness to keep the lining from tearing. It had been extremely lucky of him to find this field on that first day, wide and open and not close to much else but other empty fields. He’s thankful nobody’s moved in yet to set up shop around it, nobody’s witnessed him smash the life and death out of more pianos than any reasonable adult should ever think about smashing. Fragments of keys he can’t ever quite manage to gather up still litter the dirt in lots of places, but thankfully, nobody seems to care much about this field or even visit it aside from him. With a hard breath out, he slides behind the steering wheel and peels his gloves off. He’ll have to get a new piano soon.

It’s not exactly what he might call a ritual, buying a new piano every time he destroys one, but he does always do it, gets too antsy at the sight of the room if there’s nothing there to fill all that space. After he got home from the first ordeal, after he dumped every bag in the first dumpster he saw and made the rest of the drive home with his mind only half in his body, the emptiness was jarring. He hated the piano, but he spent so many months getting accustomed to hating it that he couldn’t deal with it being gone. Within the next few days, he’d pushed some of his furniture around to make more room for it, and by the end of the following week, he’d shelled out a few hundred dollars for an equally ancient and nonfunctional model from some chump on craigslist. Perhaps not the most sound purchase of his life, but it certainly made him feel better to slide it over the floorboards into the spot he’d cleared up for it, and it certainly made him feel better to beat to splinters with a hammer, as well.

Now he’ll be needing to search again. As soon as he’s dumped his debris and made it home, he nestles into the couch with his computer and checks the local listings. He finds one after a short search, just as old and ugly and useless as he’s had in his apartment before, just as much a gross waste of a few hundred dollars he can’t afford not to spend. The seller emails him back quickly, and after a short exchange of emails no more than a sentence or two in length, they arrange for Wonwoo to pick it up after he gets off work the following Friday. His computer closes with a soft click and slides off his lap and onto the empty cushion beside him, and he turns on the evening news while he ignores the haunting emptiness of the corner of the living room.

Monday morning, he goes back to work just like any other day, like he didn’t take out every ounce of pent-up rage on a helpless piano over the weekend. This building is covered in windows, and sometimes, Wonwoo wishes he could take a baseball bat to every single one of them, shatter each inch of glass and leave every single story in shambles, but he knows there are a lot of problems with that aside from how he’d never be able to hit every window and how he’d absolutely get fired and most likely jailed on the spot. It’s a very dangerous thing to be the only stone in a world made of glass.

Something fishy seems to be afoot near his desk this morning. As he nears, he spots the department head leaned obnoxiously against the feeble wall of the cubicle, threatening at any moment to bring it to the ground. He looks like he’s talking to someone Wonwoo can’t see, someone in the cube that backs up to his across the hallway, and that’s even fishier, because that’s where Dave sat, and Dave got transferred two weeks ago. The department head has always been known for his bizarrely keen peripheral vision; he spots Wonwoo coming down the causeway from a ten foot distance and turns his head to flash a smile that doesn’t touch his eyes.

“Morning, Jeon,” he barks, gruff and very obviously attempting to be chummier than usual. “I’ve got some great news for you.”

“Oh, goody,” Wonwoo coughs with a thin smile. “I can’t believe I’m finally being promoted to CFO.”

“Hilarious as always.” He doesn’t even try to act amused anymore. Wonwoo is not surprised. The man’s arm swings a little too forcefully toward the cubicle he was talking at, which Wonwoo sees as he nears does in fact contain a person. “The good news is you’re getting a friend to replace Johnson. I know you were lonely.” He jerks his chin at the man sitting in the chair. “This is Hong. He transferred today, and he’s got rave reviews across the board, so you better be at least halfway decent.” Wonwoo scoffs.

“I’m the nicest guy in the office,” he states with a haughty sort of irony that falls flat on the ground. “Great to meet you, Hong,” he continues without much more than a cursory glance at the guy, falling into his chair and logging into the computer with unseeing eyes and fingers that have long since memorized their map of keys. “Pleasure to be working together. Give me a tap on the shoulder if you have any questions.” He makes very certain to say it in a way that makes plain he couldn’t be any less enthused to answer questions. The department head sighs behind him, but without another word, the sound of his heels tapping down the aisle is echoing ever softer.

Ten minutes of blissful silence float by before Wonwoo hears a throat being cleared behind him, the sharp intake of breath that always comes immediately before words. He waits for those words, gut cement with dread, but they don’t come. Instead, he receives a tap on the shoulder from two gentle fingertips.

“Uh,” comes a voice, presumably belonging to the person attached to the fingers still hovering over his shoulder. It’s nice and smooth and soft, more pleasant on the ears than Wonwoo was expecting, and he accidentally turns around at the sound, finds himself face-to-face with the source. He stares for one long second.

“Need something, Hong?”

Much as Wonwoo hates to think something so strange, he certainly looks like someone who deserves nothing but niceness. Every feature exudes fragility: stooped shoulders, soft lips in an uncertain frown, hair styled but still inevitably falling in gentle swathes where the gel isn’t quite enough to hold it back, hands trembling just enough to be noticed. He has big eyes, pretty eyes, doe eyes, and they demand Wonwoo be gentle, but something searing at the back of his throat gives him the urge to tear the whole planet to shreds, something pressing from behind the backs of his eyes. He ignores it.

“I would prefer,” he begins, very gentle and very timid, “if you would call me Joshua instead.” Wonwoo’s head is tearing itself in two over whether he wants to like him enough to keep him safe or hate him to a bloody death, and it’s making his stomach churn. “Hong feels so impersonal.” Wonwoo could laugh. He wants nothing more than for everything about work to be as impersonal as possible. Instead of laughing, he rests his elbows on the edge of his desk and leans back onto them.

“Alright then, Joshua.” It smacks of venom, but Joshua still looks unnervingly relieved. “What can I do for you?”

“I was wondering if you could tell me where the copier is.” He looks embarrassed to hell about having to ask at all, cheeks barely pink and mouth a flat line. “The department head said he’d show me where everything was, but he didn’t, and I really need to make some copies.” Wonwoo points lazily.

“Go down that way,” he says, and Joshua’s eyes follow, “then turn right and walk down the hall, and it’ll be about the fourth door you see.”

“Fourth door,” he mutters. “Thanks.”

“Sure thing.” Wonwoo turns back around to face his computer screen, white and blinding. “Let me know if you need anything else, slugger.” Joshua’s tinkling laughter hits his ears with the sound of receding footfalls, and Wonwoo finds his mind fixated on that body, on how easy it would be to break if he ever decided to do it. He blows out air through his nostrils and sets his fingers back to his keys, wonders when his thoughts started getting so unhealthy and when he decided he was okay with it. He wonders when he’ll decide it has to change.

It wasn’t always this bad. Before, he only ever wanted to break things, only ever wished he could ruin windows and pianos and every table in every restaurant. Now it’s everything, living or non, anything that looks like it could be broken or destroyed or hurt, and it gives him a headache. Maybe this is a side effect of letting himself indulge in some of that latent violence every now and then, this infestation of other veins of thought; if he had known things would get this bad, maybe he never would’ve smashed apart that first piano way back when. Maybe he would have done it anyway. When he closes his eyes, he sees bruises on skin that isn’t his, and his throat fills with bile to think he might be responsible for them. He knows he should probably talk to a therapist, but he also knows he won’t.

Joshua doesn’t ask him anything else for the rest of the day, which is more than likely in his best interest, and Wonwoo is thankful the department head heard correctly about his adeptness, thankful he gets the time to hammer out memos and push his thoughts back toward the straight and narrow. By the time he’s rising to his feet to march out of the building for the day and hears Joshua’s voice call out a farewell greeting behind him, all he’s thinking about is traffic and whether it’s going to be bad enough to make his blood pressure spike again. Fortunately, it isn’t.

When he gets home, he takes a good look in the mirror. As unsettling as it ought to be, he’s not surprised at all to think that the picture staring back at him from the silver is exactly what a monster looks like, disguised in human clothes and human skin, but a monster all the same. The longer he looks, the more his head hurts, the more his shirtsleeves look like scales and his eyes like rotting sockets, his hands like weapons. Joshua’s face is a brief flash behind his eyelids when he blinks them, and a new piano could not be farther from what he needs, but it’s what he’s getting regardless.

Not until Friday afternoon does Joshua say anything more to him beyond a manufactured one- or two-word greeting at arrival and departure. Wonwoo has been very uncomfortably fixated on the shape of him for the past few days, the line of his jaw and the curve of his eyes and the arch of his lips, and he tries to pinpoint why that is while he listens to him speak, figures it may have something to do with how he looks so prone to damage, how he looks like everyone he’s ever crossed paths with has loved him. Regardless of the reason, he hopes picking up the piano later will alleviate it, reassume its position as the locus of negative thoughts. If it doesn’t, he’s almost certainly fucked.

“Would you want to have dinner tonight?” is what he asks, and Wonwoo is so focused on keeping his brain in check that the meaning evades him for twice as long as usual. He blinks.

“Dinner?” he asks back, elbows hurting where the edge of his desk digs into them. “As in you with me?”

“Is that okay?” Probably not. Wonwoo sighs and leans forward to gather his bag.

“I’m busy tonight,” he says, and he should have just said no flat out, but he can never get himself to do anything that’s right anymore. “I have a piano to go pick up.”

“You play piano?” Wonwoo looks up without meaning to. The question catches him just a little bit off guard, or maybe it’s the interest behind the question, given that it would only make sense to ask as long as you cared to know as much about whoever’s answering. Joshua waits for the answer with expectations Wonwoo can’t meet.

“Not really.”

“Ah.” He chews on it while Wonwoo watches. “Are you learning, then?” It makes more sense to lie. It makes him seem a little more normal to lie.

“Not really,” he repeats. For a long time, Joshua looks at him, and for a long time, Wonwoo stares back. As he does, he finds it pertinent to remind himself that this is a human being and not a beautiful statue, that bruises hurt and scars are forever, that a well-meaning coworker should be a boon more than a bane. Eventually, Joshua smiles.

“Maybe next time,” he says. Wonwoo’s smile back is drained.

“Maybe next time.”

The piano does help when he gets it, beautiful in all its shoddy glory where he shoves it into the corner of the cramped living room after breaking a fierce sweat and heaving breaths loud enough to concern his neighbors, but it still doesn’t stop Joshua’s face from being the last thing in Wonwoo’s mind before he falls asleep.

Tuesday afternoon, Joshua tries again. “Any chance you might want to have dinner?” he asks. Wonwoo slams his palm down on the top of the stapler a little harder than he intends due to the little waves of surprise crashing at his shoulders and looks across the narrow causeway to where Joshua sits mostly leaning out of his cubicle. He looks very hopeful, and his face is the kind that deserves a return on hope, but Wonwoo is still thinking about the hammer in the glove compartment of his car and all the damage it could do, and he has at least enough sense to do what’s best for the both of them.

“No, thanks,” he says.

“Busy again?” Joshua asks. He’s a little nosy, it seems. “Picking up another piano?” Wonwoo doesn’t know why that makes him laugh so hard, but Jim across from him stands to glare over the top of the partition until he shuts up.

“Caught me red-handed.”

“You must be a collector.” A breath blows out slow through Wonwoo’s nostrils, and he slides the next few sheets into the maw of the stapler and taps its head again.

“You might say that.” Joshua looks back into him for a minute, mouth curled in a delicate smile and eyes slightly crinkled. His face says he couldn’t be any more convinced that having dinner with Wonwoo is the best idea on his list of things to do, and he glitters expectantly, his entire being.

“Maybe next time.” Purple is all Wonwoo sees, tinting the edges of his vision and drawing its ghastly dyes on peeking corners of skin, and he has all the good sense to turn back around to his desk without saying a word, palm pressing hard on the stapler once more.

Unfortunately, Joshua is impossible to deter. One week and a few cents later, on Thursday, Joshua asks him again if he’d be interested in having dinner, and Wonwoo knows it’ll be outlandishly conspicuous of him to say no again on the grounds of being busy, but he still doesn’t want to say yes. Joshua is maddeningly fragile every time Wonwoo looks at him, unbelievably easy to break by the looks of every joint, and bad ideas have never been quite so easy to nip in the bud. He shakes his head at the question when he hears it.

“Afraid not.”

“Is there a reason you refuse to eat with me,” Joshua begins, “or are you really just busier than you look?”

“Is there a reason you won’t stop asking me?” Wonwoo glances up from his stapler when he says it, and Joshua’s stare on him is intent, mouth creased in a line that flattens lips normally so full. He is frustrated and frustrating and Wonwoo wants to bury his fist somewhere it can’t do any damage.

“I transferred from a branch out of town,” Joshua reminds him gently, “and I don’t have any friends yet, so I’m trying to make one.” A sigh tears itself quietly from Wonwoo’s lips.

“I just don’t think it’s a good idea for us to be friends outside of work.”

“Why not?” This isn’t something Wonwoo ever wants to breathe onto the air, least of all while at work, but Joshua very graciously plows on instead of waiting for an answer. “Aren’t you the nicest guy in the office, anyhow?” Without intending to, Wonwoo lets a loud laugh fly free off his lips, hard and pressing at his ribs, and he likes the feeling every bit as much as he wishes he wouldn’t. Joshua smiles with pride while he watches Wonwoo laugh, and it prompts another weighted breath to come rolling from his tongue the very second he’s coughed out his final chuckle.

“I guess I am,” he muses, stretching his arms out behind him until he feels his shoulder blades almost touch and hears his knuckles pop. At long last, with his chin propped up on a fist over the back of his chair, his lips slide into a lonely sort of smile that isn’t at all happy. “Fine.” Joshua brightens up alarmingly, eyes reflections of the cosmos. “I’ll have dinner with you.”

Their destination is none other than a very unassuming Applebee’s Wonwoo has passed more than a handful of times en route to other places he’d much rather be, but it’s suitable enough for a mediocre meal between two stiff coworkers who shouldn’t get to know each other in the first place, so he’s got no room to make complaints. Business is expectedly slow for an unimportant Thursday evening, and they’re seated in minutes, a booth pushed too far in the corner for Wonwoo to be comfortable under an awkward yellow lightbulb that casts too many shadows. Their glasses look easy to break, smash against the tabletop with one swift motion, and Wonwoo very desperately resists his arm’s willingness to test out that ease.

“So,” Wonwoo begins, more like chokes, after their server has left with their orders and promised a speedy delivery, “how are you getting used to things in town?”

“Fine, I guess,” Joshua tells him, pushing ice around in circles at the bottom of his glass with his straw. “I just don’t really like having nothing to do but work, you know?”

“Take up knitting,” Wonwoo suggests, and Joshua covers his mouth with his hand while he laughs into it, eyes crinkling and shoulders shaking. As far as Wonwoo is concerned, it wasn’t really a joke, and he’d appreciate the laughter more sometime he’s actually trying to earn it. “Jesus, stop laughing.”

“You’re funny,” Joshua defends, dropping his hand back to the table and resuming his task of stirring the water in his glass.

“It was a real suggestion.”

“Do you knit?”

“Of course not.”

“What do you do, then?” Wonwoo blinks. The conversation’s sudden turn to him is remarkably uncomfortable, especially considering the nearness and suffocating delicacy of Joshua across the table, eyes shining and lips parted. Thoughts race through Wonwoo’s head, and he doesn’t want to divulge any of them at a dingy table in a mediocre restaurant, shouldn’t even think of it unless he’s leveling his eyes with a professional. “Yoga? Golf?”

“No,” he answers carefully, rolling his silverware back and forth over the tabletop, “just usual things, you know. Watching the news. Reading the paper.” Smashing pianos. Some hobbies are better kept as secrets. Joshua waits for more, but Wonwoo won’t crack now.

“That’s so boring,” he sighs at last, poking his straw around a little more. Boring is better than bizarre and disturbing any day of the week.

“I’m a boring guy,” Wonwoo tells him through gritted teeth.

“I don’t think so,” Joshua rattles back with a heavy gaze, and the weight of the entire universe adjusts itself on Wonwoo’s shoulders just enough to be intensely more unbearable, stifling his breaths before they even think to swim through his throat. Those eyes are too intent for Wonwoo to look into without feeling like he might suffocate, so he pretends to care when their server is coming back and casts his eyes to the side.

“You don’t know me well enough to make that judgement,” he mutters with his glance, silverware taking another flip at the will of his restless hands.

“We should hang out more outside of work, then,” Joshua proposes, and Wonwoo looks at him too fast. The light is doing beautiful things to his features and ugly things to Wonwoo’s head.

“Very slippery of you,” he hums, a stiff single bar of monotone, “but no.” Joshua expectedly frowns.

“Can I get a reason?”

“Look,” Wonwoo tells him, fists falling to grip at his knees with white knuckle intensity, “I’m already having dinner with you, aren’t I?” His fingertips dig through the fabric of his slacks to leave dents where the press, almost to the skin. “I don’t know what else you want.”

“Companionship.”

“Make friends with Earl in HR. He’s a great guy.” There must be bruises ringing his kneecaps by now, but he still can’t handle looking Joshua in the face. “I hear he’s looking for someone to jog with on lunch breaks.” Joshua coughs.

“Do you have something against me?”

That’s rich. If only it were as simple as having something against him, Wonwoo could just say it. He could just say it and be done, just tell Joshua to buzz off and leave him alone, just drive out to that same old field and smash his newest piano into smithereens. He should say it anyway, regardless of honesty, but he was always raised to tell the truth, and the truth unfortunately is that there’s nothing to have against him. Joshua has been nothing but perfectly pleasant, nice and quiet, won’t even ask annoying questions like he’s heard the other new transfers do to Jim and Ellen in months past. The worst he’s done is pester Wonwoo to eat with him, and it’s only the worst because Wonwoo sees the possibility of purpling contusions whenever he lays eyes on arms past where the cuffs of Joshua’s sleeves are rolled, knows his hypothetical fingertips are behind every one.

“No,” he grumbles, sliding his hands up slowly to press thumbs into his thin thigs while his eyes stay just skirting around the crown of Joshua’s head. “I already told you. I think it’s a bad idea for us to be friends outside of work.”

“But you didn’t tell me why.” Wonwoo sighs.

“You seem like a very nice guy.” Ears perk up like Joshua is waiting for the _but_ , waiting for the second half, the explanation, but there is nothing. Wonwoo has nothing. He does seem like a very nice guy, and it’s no good at all for a very nice guy to spend time with a man who’s thought more than once about how easy it would be to break him in half. They stare at each other once his words die on the air, both waiting, and Wonwoo ages twenty years before he speaks again, throat aching with gathered dust. “I’m not that.”

“I think you’re nice enough,” Joshua tells him. So naïve, those eyes. He doesn’t know anything about anything.

“You’re wrong.”

“Am I?” Fingers stroke his chin, slender and rounded out by short nails, and Wonwoo wishes his brain would lead him first to holding them rather than lining each knuckle up under the head of a hammer. “But you said yourself you’re the nicest guy in the office.” Not often does Wonwoo regret saying anything as much as he regrets making that particular facetious statement on Joshua’s first day at the office, but if he could go back in time and duct tape his mouth shut for just that morning, he’d do it in a heartbeat. His lips part to argue, but their waiter interrupts him by arriving, lowering plates to the table with an unpleasant clatter.

“Be careful! These are hot!”

Dinner is awkward, and it’s Wonwoo’s fault. It’s awkward because he has to keep reeling the conversation back with taut fishing line to be about only the most mundane topics imaginable, and it’s awkward because Wonwoo wants it to be, wants to send a clear message that inside the walls of the office building is the only time they should be comfortable seeing each other. Judging by the way he smiles and the way he laughs, Joshua is too dense to understand that he’s supposed to be having a bad time, and he still thanks Wonwoo for having dinner with him on departure, still smiles and waves and does all things nice men do. Wonwoo still feels the steering wheel pressing into his palms for ten minutes after he gets home, and he resolves to fend off any further invitations tossed his way at the price of his life, sits down at the piano for the first time and wonders why he can’t just teach himself to love these keys whole.

Fending off invitations is easier in promise than in practice. Wonwoo gets too scared of his own head to remind himself he has to say _no_ , tenses his shoulders too much to shake his head around them, blinks and wakes up in the middle of meals he doesn’t remember agreeing to have. To his further dismay, he likes Joshua. Of course he does. Who wouldn’t? He’s nice. He laughs at jokes Wonwoo knows he doesn’t deserve praise for, laughs at things that shouldn’t even be jokes to begin with. He smiles a lot, asks questions like he cares, gives answers like he means them. He’s gentle. He’s handsome. Of course Wonwoo likes him. Of course he would.

Liking him doesn’t change anything about the nasty little thoughts that claw into his brain the second he’s let his guard down, though. Liking him doesn’t mean everything is fixed, doesn’t mean he’s calm and clear and cool for the first time in years. All it does is make him feel like an angrier version of a high school kid with a bad crush, more violent and less controlled, and in a lot of ways, that’s worse than not liking him, because his brain now rends itself apart every moment he spends awake. He agrees to go to dinner, or the showing of _Seussical_ at the community theater, or for an evening run that leaves him panting, and he spends every second of everything wondering how long he can put himself through it. Weeks pass, and he wonders how long he can make it before that instrument in his den is rubble stuffed in garbage bags and the circles under his eyes are too heavy to get them opened anymore.

One Friday evening, they go to a bar. Bars are bad places for Wonwoo to be because alcohol is bad for him, makes him loosen up too much and put his hands places they shouldn’t ever touch. He spots his hand on Joshua’s shoulder four separate times and keeps wondering how it ended up there and why Joshua’s not swatting it away. Only seconds and a waning wall of willpower stand between finding out how hard he can press his fingertips into the flesh around his collarbone before it starts to hurt, and he squeezes his eyes shut to pretend he can’t think about it, accidentally digs his thumb in a little too hard. Joshua is alive under his palm.

“Hey.” Wonwoo’s eyes flit back open, and Joshua is looking at him under a veil of lashes, shoulder still trapped under a bony grip. He commands his hand not to move a muscle. “Do you want to come back to my place?” They’ve both had a little to drink. Joshua is close, breath hitting Wonwoo’s chin and hand hovering by his chest, and Wonwoo’s ears are swimming.

“What?” Suddenly, suddenly, he’s closer.

“Do you want to come back to my place?” he repeats, voice low, eyes heavy. No, no, no. It’s all wrong. This is a mistake. He can’t go anywhere but home right now, when his hands are buzzing like wasps. But Joshua looks incredible even under dim lights.

“Sure.”

Everything is very hazy from the moment they walk through the door. Wonwoo is still sober enough to know what’s going on, but just tipsy enough to be unable to stop his hands from roaming, just out enough to be confused when Joshua’s lips land on his. His eyes are half-closed and half-open forever, blind as he twists his way out of clothing and into sheets, uses his hands to see. Joshua tastes like the last drink he had even on the skin, and Wonwoo’s hands feel all over, everywhere. His head fills with lead. This is a mistake, a terrible mistake, but he needs more of it.

“Wonwoo,” Joshua breathes at him, airy and quiet, and it takes Wonwoo minutes to hear it.

“I’m here,” Wonwoo huffs back, eyes closed, mouth busy at the base of Joshua’s neck.

“Wonwoo,” Joshua repeats, short and strained. “Your hands.” Wonwoo feels arms struggling to move inside his clenched fists and snaps his eyes open, comes back to reality only a single second before he hears Joshua grunt, “It hurts.”

“Oh.” He stares down with empty eyes, down at the way his fingers squeeze unrelenting into the body below him, how Joshua’s mouth sits in an ugly line of pain and his brows draw together. Wonwoo blinks once, and every inch of skin is sick green and sicker purple, every corner tinged in ruddy crimson, and everything is his fault, everything, everything. He looks in Joshua’s eyes and sees himself, sees a monster, and he hates the sight of it.

Never has he flung himself off someone with so much speed. An instant has passed, and he’s busying his hands drawing the waistband of his trousers back up and snapping the buttons shut, shrugging his shirt back on and eyeing the room for where he’s left his shoes. Silence sits behind him until he’s almost all the way clothed, and Joshua kills it by stirring forward to grab at his shoulder. His touch burns.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry,” Wonwoo says in lieu of answering, tightening the clasp on his belt buckle while he does. Joshua doesn’t let go of his shoulder.

“Are you leaving?” There is a certain edge to his voice that Wonwoo knows he won’t want to see reflected on his face, so he doesn’t turn around.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I need to go.” Despite how he looks, Joshua’s grip is strong, soft fingertips like hooks where they fit around Wonwoo’s collarbone.

“Why do you have to go?” His voice is pleading, and Wonwoo can’t stand hearing it right now.

“I have to.”

“Why won’t you ever give me a real answer?” The hand on Wonwoo’s shoulder tugs a little more fiercely, and Wonwoo lets his body be thrown, pulled around to face him head on. The room is dark and the night outside is darker, but Joshua glows like the moon, chest and neck and shoulders and face, eyes lost and confused. Wonwoo feels like he’s drowning and like he might throw up.

“I’m sorry,” he coughs, and everything is still vivid purple green.

“Don’t apologize,” Joshua orders gently, grip maintained. “Just tell me why you’re leaving.”

“I shouldn’t have come,” Wonwoo tells him, and he doesn’t want to do this. All he wants is his hammer and his piano and a little piece of mind. “It was a mistake. This is all a mistake.”

“Why?”

“Stop asking why,” he groans. “Just let me go.”

“I don’t want you to go,” Joshua says, reeking of hurt. He must not know what’s good for him. “Can’t you tell me why you have to leave?”

“I hurt you,” Wonwoo spits through gritted teeth.

“You didn’t.”

“You said it yourself,” Wonwoo hisses.

“I didn’t mean,” Joshua begins, and he lets the sentence draw itself to a close with a thick sigh and no words further. “You didn’t hurt me. I’m fine.”

“But I almost did.”

“But you didn’t.” His grip relaxes, but not quite enough for Wonwoo to tear himself away just yet. Not that he could anyway with how frozen his entire body is. “I didn’t want you to leave.” Now is when it strikes Wonwoo that he’s fucking up outside of his head, too, that he’s decided to leave to keep Joshua safe without letting Joshua know he was ever in danger and that this looks a whole lot more like a standup than it was ever meant to be, and he hates everything about it. He hates his brain for doing this to him, hates himself for letting it go on, hates living like this and pretending it’s fine.

“I’m sorry,” is all he says, and he thinks he doesn’t sound like himself much at all. Hot streaks are sudden in appearing on his face, and he watches Joshua watch them form, looks at the reflections of tears as they trace toward his jaw.

“Are you alright?” Joshua whispers, thumbing away the thin trails of moisture to make room for fresh rivulets they try in vain to brush aside again. Wonwoo could laugh at the absurdity of the question. He could cry if he weren’t already. Of course he’s not alright; it’s been so hellishly long since that adjective has even seemed true. He can’t bring himself to answer or to shake his head, but Joshua looks like he doesn’t need the response. “Will you tell me what’s going on?”

“Are you busy tomorrow?” Wonwoo asks on impulse, brain flashing to a hammer in his glove compartment and a piano in his living room, fingers thrumming where they rest idly near his belt loops. Joshua quirks his lips in a bizarre halfway-there sort of grin.

“I’m never busy.”

“I need to show you something.” For a long time, they only look at each other, stars outside glittering more dimly as they pass overhead, not touching the insides of the room.

“Okay,” Joshua says at last, and Wonwoo’s chest is torn between releasing a breath of relief and seizing up with nerves. A tug comes at his shoulder when Joshua reclines back onto the mattress. “Stay the night here.” A little more insistent and a little more gentle at the same time. “Take off your belt.” Wonwoo would rather die than comply, but his stiff fingers still find their way to the clasp, and it’s so much easier to keep living.

Taking someone with him when he goes to smash a piano is something he had never considered the possibility of doing someday, and it is nerve-wracking beyond what he would have expected had he ever decided to think about it. Joshua sitting in the passenger seat of his car instead of the usual mallet makes him feel like he’s choking, and the way the piano knocks back and forth just so despite the way he’s strapped it in the back with bungee cords doesn’t help things one bit. Parts of him, large parts, wrestle for control of his hands, to jerk the steering wheel and send them straight through the guardrail, but he keeps them in check as best he can under where he sees Joshua’s eyes fixed on him in his periphery.

They don’t say much to each other all morning or on the duration of the drive, silence pervading even once they’ve arrived at their barren field of destination. Without a word, Joshua helps him unload the piano from the back, lifts one end to let the broken wheels at its feet come to rest among the short brown grass of the dry field surrounding them, small clouds of dirt kicking up in the wake of its landing. Wonwoo is uncomfortable with how easy it is to move with someone helping him, and he’s just as uncomfortable with the way Joshua is looking at him like he’s still in decent company, like he’s totally trusting and not at all scared. Wonwoo blinks until he can’t see bruises anymore, fists clenched in his pockets.

“What are we doing?” Joshua asks finally, gaze flicking between the unpolished top of the weary old piano and the unpolished face of his weary old coworker with unfettered curiosity. Wonwoo heaves a sigh and meanders to retrieve his trusty hammer from where it’s been locked up in the glove compartment, watches Joshua’s eyes widen and follow it while he rests his elbows on the edges of the piano.

“You’ll see.” In all his adult life, he’s never known his voice to sound so hollow. His stomach is threatening to turn itself empty at any moment, but he pushes his full weight against the piano to distance it from the car and pretends he can’t feel it. “You should wait in the car.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see,” he echoes. Wary though he is, Joshua walks back to the car and climbs in, turned around to watch through the window as Wonwoo shoves his victim-to-be further into the gritty distance. His shoulder blades are close to cracking under the pressure of Joshua’s eyes chasing after him, and his arms are close to falling off, but he has to do this now even if he feels like crumbling. He blinks his eyes and he looks at the piano and he still wants it to die. With a deliberate swing of the arm, he raises the hammer overhead, gripped tightly in hand, and with another, he brings it back down into the ugly faux ivory of the age-warped keys.

It isn’t therapeutic.

Right now, with an audience of one, it doesn’t make him feel better at all, not quite like usual. Every cell in his body sighs in relief with each crash of the hammer’s head into poorly lacquered wood, but his brain can’t quite keep up like usual, can’t quite join in knowing Joshua is watching it happen. Strike after strike, and he is quickly unpeeling the shell from the ugliest side of him and putting it on full display. Full display to Joshua, who is kind and gentle and pleasant and many things Wonwoo has never been. To Joshua, whom Wonwoo has found himself liking a great deal more than he thought he ever would or would want to. Joshua, whose face Wonwoo still sees whenever he blinks his tired eyes and between every swing, whose skin he spots shattering alongside the legs that once supported the piano’s front half. Enough, enough, enough. He wants this to stop, wants his mind to rest for the first time in years, and he keeps swinging until there’s nothing left to hit, until the piano is powdered before him, eyes shut tight and Joshua always floating just behind them.

The process of cleaning up the piano debris is much slower today than normal for many reasons. Slow because he’s more tired than usual after tearing his brain in half, slow because his eyes started watering when he wasn’t pay attention and he doesn’t want Joshua to see the dirty salt streaks tracing his cheeks, slow because he’s afraid to trap himself in the car with Joshua again and see the inevitable horror on his face. He makes gradual work of gathering all the rubbish into heavy black bags and tying them off, shoving them one-by-one into the back of the car until there’s nothing left but ungatherable shards of violence littering the field and he has no more excuse to put off climbing behind the wheel. Joshua is quiet in the front seat when he finally musters up the courage to get in, extends a hand wordlessly to take the hammer from Wonwoo’s grasp and shut it in the glove compartment with a soft click.

“You smashed the piano,” Joshua says after a while of silent sitting in the car, a mutter that sounds like a shout, both eyes forward out the windshield to watch nothing at all go by.

“I did,” Wonwoo confirms, toying with the key he’s already put in the ignition but hasn’t yet found the strength to turn. Joshua’s breathing sounds like thunder.

“Do you do that often?”

“Sort of,” Wonwoo tells him. Only brushing your teeth once every few months is seldom, but flying to the Bahamas once every few months is frequent, and he’s not sure where on that scale destroying pianos might fall. “More often than you do, I’d guess.” Joshua chuckles despite how hard Wonwoo knows he must be working to scrounge up a single speck of mirth.

“Why do you do it?” There is no edge to the question, but it still makes Wonwoo wince.

“It makes me feel better,” he explains. _Usually_ , he neglects to mention, _but not today_. From the corner of his eye, he can spot Joshua’s head nodding, though he can’t pinpoint why he should be.

“I get it,” Joshua says, and Wonwoo coughs.

“Excuse me?”

“I do kind of the same thing.” How similar is _kind of_? Wonwoo snaps his neck to look in Joshua’s direction with quizzical eyes that betray more than just a little confusion, and he’s alarmed by how his heartrate quickens when he sees Joshua is already looking back at him. “Sometimes I’ll just go buy a bible and rip every page out one-by-one to get all my stress out.” There are questions Wonwoo wants to ask, like why it has to be a bible and whether it takes a long time, but he bites his tongue on those for now.

“That’s not the same.”

“I think it’s similar.”

“It isn’t,” Wonwoo sighs, turning back to point his eyes out the window. “You don’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand?”

“I destroyed that piano,” Wonwoo stresses, hands in stiff fists on his knees. “I smashed into pieces. I broke it into nothing. Okay?”

“I know,” Joshua tells him. He doesn’t know the half of it.

“And sometimes I think”—he chokes on his own tongue, gulps to get past it, blinks away the pink flush of fresh wounds on fair skin—“about doing the same thing to you.”

Unsurprisingly, Joshua doesn’t say anything. Wonwoo waits for him to get out of the car and run away, maybe to call the police or maybe to scream, but his expectations are unfulfilled. The thick gravity of the hush in the car is what gets him to look at Joshua again, vertebrae in his neck aching as they give way to the turn of his head. Joshua isn’t looking at him anymore, instead fixed staring out at the empty field sprawling in front of them. His eyes are wide while he stares, and he doesn’t exactly look scared, but he also seems far from comfortable. Wonwoo’s thoughts still wander to how easily he could grab the arm closest to him, how simple it might be to crush, and he hates this awful head.

“Joshua?” A breath stutters out of his lips at the sound of Wonwoo’s voice, and Wonwoo has to stop looking at him again when he opens his mouth to speak.

“Is that true?”

“Yes.” Wonwoo takes a slow gulp of too-dry air. “That’s why it’s a bad idea for us to see each other outside the office.” No words pass for another long while.

“So you want,” Joshua begins eventually, hesitant, testing, “to hurt me?”

“No,” Wonwoo says quickly, as quick as he can, almost turning to look Joshua in the face again but chickening out at the last moment. “God, no, I don’t want to, but I just…” He groans, and the next part comes out a whisper. “I’m scared I might.”

“How long have you, uh, been thinking about it?” Honesty, Wonwoo reminds himself. Honesty is important even if it’s worse.

“Since I met you,” he coughs. “I can’t really help thinking it, you know, I just… when I see you, all these thoughts come in, and I can never get them out.”

“How long have you been having thoughts like this, just in general?” Joshua sounds a lot more concerned for Wonwoo than he should, and Wonwoo hates that his chest aches in want of that concern.

“I don’t know.” A hard pause. “A long time.”

“Have you told anyone else?”

“No.” He stares at his hands atop his knees, at the veins and the knuckles, shivers over how scary it is that they look so human yet not. “Just you.” Something moves outside the car, or maybe nothing does, but Wonwoo jerks his chin and then his eyes are on Joshua’s and he doesn’t feel so much like an adult anymore, doesn’t feel like anything but a kid who wants to go home. “Am I scaring you?”

“I’m not scared,” Joshua assures him. His eyebrows are drawn together, but true to his words, he doesn’t look afraid. Wonwoo focuses on the smoothness of his face, round and soft and gentle, tries to block out the claws digging at his gray matter even though it makes him want to scream.

“Do you think I’m a monster?”

“Of course not.”

“Why?”

“What have you done to make you one?” The sudden presence of Joshua’s hand on his shoulder tears him from the present reality and grounds him all at once, head spinning in an uneasy shade of purpled green. “You’re just a person, Wonwoo. You can’t help your thoughts any more than anyone else.” Joshua’s thumb moves in a small circle by his collarbone, and Wonwoo’s body rips itself to dizzy pieces. “I could almost say you’re a hero.” He barks a laugh.

“You’d be an idiot if you said that.” Joshua laughs once back.

“Maybe.”

Another pause separates them from each other for a while, stones of iron rolling slowly down to weigh on Wonwoo’s head with each second’s passage. Joshua’s gaze on him is a maddening comfort that makes his skin itch, and after every inch of his body has caught bright red fire, he decides to speak again.

“I wanted to tell you,” he chokes out, “because I started to really like you, and I don’t know how long I can keep doing this.”

“Help is out there as long as you want it,” Joshua sighs, leaning back in his seat and drawing is hand again to sit in his lap. “I know someone you can talk to who’d be better than talking to me.” Two beats knock by. “And I also really like you.” Wonwoo feels half his age when he smiles at the steering wheel and turns the engine to life to drown out his muted laughter.

“You’re too nice for your own good,” he says.

“Still not the nicest guy in the office,” Joshua chuckles back. A fly lands on the windshield with a lazy buzz and rubs its little hands together while it stares at the awkward pair of them through the glass. “Let’s go already, yeah?”

When Wonwoo pulls back onto the road with streaks of dirt trailing behind him, he sees something in the most distant edge of the sky that almost looks like a rainbow despite not a cloud being in sight. As they wander back into town, he sees clean hands and unstained fingers, and he hopes he’ll never find himself in that field again.

The professional Joshua directs him to is, much like Joshua himself, a very nice guy. He’s patient for the entire half hour Wonwoo spends avoiding confession of the real reason behind his visit, pen lowered to pad but very conspicuously not writing anything until Wonwoo’s said something of substance. His eyes are sharp behind wire frames, foot occasionally tapping an inconsistent rhythm against the leg of his chair, and he doesn’t react at all when Wonwoo finally rakes his hands through his hair and wrings them over his lap.

“Alright,” he says. “For a long time now, I’ve been struggling with a lot of thoughts.” The pen twitches.

“What kind of thoughts?”

“Violent ones,” Wonwoo breathes, broken ivory keys a flash under his eyelids, bettered skin the lining of his lashes. “I want them gone.” With a thin smile, the man opposite him begins at last to drag his pen in swoops across the page, letter by letter by letter.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he says, and Wonwoo sighs with a force that dislocates every rib. Now, he tells himself. Now he’s getting somewhere.

Given how many years he’s spent with a piano sitting in his living room, it feels weird to be without one, so he picks another up for what he hopes will be the last time a month and a half into the start of his therapy. Sometimes when he looks at it, he still wants to see it in pieces, but only in the deepest parts of him, and he’s sure he’s changing, if a little slowly. The top of this piano is black and reflective, miraculously smooth despite the shoddy state of the rest of the instrument’s body. As Wonwoo stands looking at it, he sees a reflection drift forward on the ebony mirror to join his own in staring back at him.

“How do you feel?” Joshua asks gently. Warmth seeps into the small of Wonwoo’s back from where Joshua’s hand hovers there. Wonwoo takes a few slow blinks before he answers, eyes on the piano’s recreation of the ceiling fan’s slowly turning blades.

“Normal,” he guesses. Fingertips touch down at the edges of the small spot of warmth on his back, tender through his shirt. “Maybe I can try learning to play it this time.”

“That could be good,” Joshua hums. His hand retreats from Wonwoo’s back to tug his tie looser around his neck while he swivels around to lean over the side of the piano, chin angled down toward the keys. “Why don’t you try playing something now?”

Wonwoo laughs at the idea, but he takes a seat at the bench anyway, starts gingerly walking his fingers over the white keys and dutifully avoiding the sparser black ones. He trails through two or three shy octaves before he looks up at Joshua, finds him smiling softly down. Now, it’s a great comfort to look at him, a charming silhouette against boring walls. There are no phantom bruises living on his skin or ghosts of pain in his eyes, no ugly flashes dyeing the insides of Wonwoo’s tired lids. There is only a simple smile in a simple curve, the exact kind of simple Wonwoo loves to see.

With that perfect arc in his mind, he exhales his deepest breath, shuts his eyes, and leads his fingers back down the scale they built for themselves. In the calm darkness of his brain, he sees the afterimage of Joshua’s smile widen alongside the half-flat tones of every key he lays a finger on, and he feels his own lips pulling into a grin to join. To play the piano after so long despising it feels a very strange sort of good, and shreds of him are in love with the faux melody he plays. When he reaches the bottom of the scale, he starts his ascent toward the top again, and he can feel echoes of unvoiced laughter bleeding through the piano’s veins when he does.

It’s therapeutic.

**Author's Note:**

> hello hello welcome to the end of the fic thank u for putting urself through it. it took me a lot longer to write this than i wanted (i haven't posted anything in like an entire month christ), and i went back and forth emotionally a lot while i was writing it, and i also went back and forth a lot on how i felt about it, but when all is said and done, i'm glad to have it finished. this was obviously inspired by wonwoo's piano smashing stage from the concerts, which kind of gave this real grand evil villain vibe, and i originally did want to make him evil and a villain but obviously that did not end up happening because i'm too soft for it. i hope u all enjoyed this fic if u made it to this point, tho i do regret choosing such an unhappy idea for wonshua when i think they're really great and wonwoo is absolutely in love with the hong (like who isn't) but thanks again so much for reading! as always, any and all feedback is greatly appreciated, and i'll see u some other time!


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